Time, Freedom Can Right Injustices

Other Views - My WORD

July 24, 2001|By Penny Villegas

When I was a student in Illinois, I thought Jim Crow laws were unfair but inevitable.

In 1954, I watched on television as United States marshals with shotguns escorted a little black girl into her first-grade classroom in Alabama. That image changed things for me and for others. So much changed, that today my students, my white students, are indignant and incredulous upon hearing that story. What happened?

Consciousness (and conscience) was raised by protest and free press. Slowly, with the images from the news media and the perseverance of good people, we changed. America changed.

Another change can be seen in the tobacco war. I, we, smoked for years in classrooms, movies and restaurants. Now smoking is not allowed in many public places, and it is not cool. This change was triggered on many fronts. Cartoons satirized cigarettes as smart-talking cancer sticks. The deception of the industry was exposed in the movie The Insider. We watched people get sick. Now television reports million-dollar settlements to smokers from the once-powerful tobacco industry -- which has skedaddled to China, where protest is not allowed.

Another shift is happening as I write. We are turning against the death penalty. My own awareness grew during the past five years. I thought, as many did and do, that guilty killers deserve to die. What changed my mind?

For one, I saw the movie Dead Man Walking. I was left with images of the inhuman killing but, most of all, the killer on the death-bed gurney. That killer was brutal but repentant.

Timothy McVeigh was just brutal. But something had happened in the past five years and not just to me. The Orlando Sentinel ran letters and essays on the execution. It was discussed in hallways and homes. Many were disturbed and sorry that this man died at our hands.

How did this shift in consciousness happen?

Five years ago, a few religious folks held candlelight vigils outside of prisons where an execution was happening. Amnesty International wrote letters. Then, magazines such as Harpers started to report and reflect on the death penalty. Now such disparate entities as Chief Justice Sandra Day O'Conner and Mother Jones magazine are questioning capital punishment.

In the past, Justice O'Conner voted in favor of the death penalty. Her reasoning was that most citizens of the United States wanted death for convicted killers. Now she's rethinking it, and so are we. Soon we might quit the company of China, Afghanistan and Iraq -- the countries in the world that practice capital punishment.

Prison reform is next. Already late-night local TV joins area newspapers to reveal the injustices of our justice system. When the people see the conditions and hear the voices in the cells, they will reject our present system and demand change.

This is how social change works and why it works. It is the ground of democracy that trusts human beings to choose right action. We need free protest, a free press and time. With time, we will do the right thing.